It is one of the most famous dreams in the Hebrew Bible, and the Targum translates it with surgical calm. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on (Genesis 37:7) repeats the imagery almost unchanged: the brothers and Joseph are binding sheaves in the field when, suddenly, Joseph's sheaf stands up.
Read it slowly. My sheaf arose, and stood upright. A sheaf is a bundle of cut grain. It cannot stand on its own. When it stands, it is either a miracle or a prophecy — and in this case, both.
Then the other sheaves — the brothers' sheaves — gather around and bow. They do not fall over. They do not scatter. They form a circle of reverence around the one sheaf that refuses to lie down.
The sages caught something subtle here. Grain in a sheaf is food. What Joseph was dreaming was not political dominance in the abstract. He was dreaming of the famine that would come — a famine in which eleven sheaves would one day stand empty, and only his sheaf, his storehouses in Egypt, would still be full. The brothers would bow not out of submission but out of hunger. The dream was not a boast. It was a warning about bread.
But Joseph was seventeen. He had just come from the school. He did not understand his own dream yet. He only knew that the vision had stood up in him and would not sit back down. So he told it. And the telling, like the sheaf, would not lie down either.